HRAF Academic Quarterly, Vol 2025-02

By Francine Barone

This summary features some of the exciting research accomplished using HRAF data from the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases as well as Explaining Human Culture (EHC), Teaching eHRAF, and other open access materials from HRAF. If you would like to stay informed of the latest eHRAF research, sign up here to receive an email when our next summary is available.

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Welcome to the second HRAF Academic Quarterly of 2025! What do mushrooms, political power, artificial intelligence, gender equality, moral gods and egalitarianism have in common? They’re all subjects of the fascinating new eHRAF-based research featured here. If you enjoy riddles, keep reading to find out why “whodunits” captivate us. Also covered in this issue are human and seagrass relationships; language and symmetry; folklore as an invaluable extension to the ethnographic record; menstrual taboos; Neanderthals’ ability to survive in wet and cold environments; and a biocultural approach to cooperative breeding. Publications from HRAF staff and affiliates this quarter include a global study of the ecological dimensions of hazards; empire and nation-building in Jamaican archaeology; and the continuation of a cross-cultural study of love symbols.

Politics, Power and Leadership

The Persistence of Female Political Power in Africa
Siwan Anderson, Sophia du Plessis, Sahar Parsa, James A. Robinson

Research on female political representation has tended to overlook the traditional role of women as leaders across many societies. Our study aims to address this gap by investigating the enduring influence of historical female political leadership on contemporary formal political representation in Africa. We test for this persistence by compiling two original datasets: one detailing female political leadership in precolonial societies and another on current female representation in local elections. Our findings indicate that ethnic groups historically allowing women in leadership roles in politics do tend to have a higher proportion of elected female representatives in today’s formal local political institutions. We also observe that institutional, rather than economic, factors significantly shape the traditional political influence of women. Moreover, in accordance with historical accounts, we uncover evidence of a reversal of female political power due to institutional changes enforced by colonial powers.

The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life
Guy A. Lavender Forsyth, Ananish Chaudhuri, Quentin Atkinson

Many people in Western countries represent the political landscape as a single dimension of conflict: authority, hierarchy, and tradition on the right versus greater freedom, equality, and systemic change on the left. Here, we argue that politics comprises not one but two primary dimensions. Moreover, these two dimensions are not unique to modern nations but reflect two evolutionary trade-offs that we call the “dual foundations” of politics and argue are inherent to human social life. One foundation concerns the trade-off between cooperation and competition and gives rise to contestation over levels of inequality and provision of public goods. The other foundation concerns the trade-off between autonomy and conformity, leading to contestation over the extent of social control. Drawing on anthropological, psychological, and historiographical evidence, we argue that these dual foundations are contested across the diversity of human lifeways and lead to two cross-culturally ubiquitous dimensions of ideology. As such, the dual foundations provide a common evolutionary framework for studying human politics across geography, history, subsistence styles, levels of social organization, and academic disciplines. We end by outlining how quantitative approaches to studying the dual foundations beyond industrialized nations can advance research on both the anthropology and psychology of political ideology.

Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies
Zachary H. Garfield, Sheina Lew-Levy

Despite extensive work on the evolution of cooperation, the roles of teaching and leadership in transmitting opaque cultural norms—foundations of cooperative behaviors—are underexplored. Similarly, while teaching is well-studied in the evolution of instrumental culture, little attention is given to its role in transmitting opaque culture, such as social values and norms. Transmitting opaque culture often requires teaching, and group leaders are well-positioned to facilitate this process. Using comparative ethnographic data, we explore teaching, leadership, and instrumental versus opaque culture by examining whether opaque culture is primarily transmitted via teaching, which age groups tend to learn these norms, and whether leaders are disproportionately involved in teaching. Drawing on ethnographic data from 23 egalitarian foraging societies, we find teaching is more strongly associated with transmitting cultural values and kinship knowledge than subsistence skills and is closely linked to opaque culture and leadership. Leader-directed teaching may drive cooperation, suggesting new research avenues.

“Fiercely Egalitarian”: Thematic Cross-Cultural Analysis Reveals Regularities in the Maintenance of Egalitarianism Across Four Independent African Hunter-Gatherer Groups
Jessame Thomson, Sheina Lew-Levy, Chris von Rueden, Duncan N. E. Stibbard-Hawkes

Globally, there are large disparities in wealth and political decision making power. By contrast, several African hunter-gatherer groups are considered exemplars of material and political egalitarianism. Whilst extant literature has revealed egalitarian maintenance mechanisms specific to individual communities, systematic cross-cultural analysis has been lacking. To better understand how egalitarianism is maintained, such ethnographic comparison would enable identification of shared and distinct processes among diverse egalitarian societies. Utilizing the eHRAF World Cultures database, we conducted a thematic analysis of 666 observations across four African hunter-gatherer groups. This study reveals six mechanisms relevant to maintaining egalitarianism: residential mobility, opportunity to acquire resources/information, widespread resource sharing/transfer, non-coercive and informal leadership, consensus-based decision making/dispute resolution, and social norm reinforcement. While these core mechanisms were actively maintained, the degree to which they were applied varied between groups. The greatest disparity was observed between the three more ‘immediate-return’ groups and the one more ‘delayed-return’ group, the latter utilising fewer levelling mechanisms. In all three more immediate-return groups, individuals formed morally unified coalitions to collaboratively suppress hierarchical behaviour. We also identify nuanced differences among the more immediate-return groups, chiefly in the balance between promoting individual autonomy and emphasising social connectedness. Examining hunter-gatherer egalitarianism from a cross-cultural perspective thus illuminates how greater equality is maintained, particularly through the dual processes of personal autonomy-seeking and coordinated collective action.

Human Ecology

Living in the Mycelial World: A global cross-cultural ethnomycological review
Roope O. Kaaronen

This manuscript documents a systematic ethnomycological analysis of ethnographic archives. Focusing on texts describing human–fungi interactions, I conduct a global, cross-cultural review of mushroom use, covering 193 societies worldwide. The study reveals diverse mushroom-related cultural practices, emphasizing the significance of fungi beyond culinary value to include domains such as rituals, medicine, folklore, and fire-making. Special attention is given to exploring how mushrooms and their foraging involve human cognition. The findings also expose a lack of detail in descriptions of human–mushroom relations. Ethnomycology continues to receive limited attention, largely due to Western mycophobic biases. This highlights the need for expanded ethnomycological research to enrich our understanding of past and present human encounters with the fungal kingdom.

Societal value of seagrass from historical to contemporary perspectives
Nicole R. Foster, Eugenia T. Apostolaki, Katelyn DiBenedetto, Carlos M. Duarte, David Gregory, Karina Inostroza, Dorte Krause-Jensen, Benjamin L. H. Jones, Eduard Serrano, Rym Zakhama-Sraieb,  Oscar Serrano

Seagrasses have been entwined with human culture for millennia, constituting a natural resource that has supported humanity throughout this history. Understanding the societal value of seagrass fosters appreciation of these ecosystems, encouraging conservation and restoration actions to counteract historic and predicted losses. This study overviews the plethora of seagrass use in human history, ranging from spiritual and ceremonial roles, direct and indirect food resources, medicines and raw materials, dating back more than 180 000 years. While many past uses have been abandoned in modern societies, others have persisted or are being rediscovered, and new applications are emerging. As these uses of seagrasses depend on harvesting, we also underscore the need for sustainable practices to (re)generate positive interactions between seagrasses and society. Our review contributes to revalue seagrass societal ecosystem services, highlighting ancient and more recent human and seagrass relationships to incentivize conservation and restoration actions.

Psychology, Language and Cognition

The impact of gendered socialisation and gender equality on psychological traits
Csilla Pákozdy (PhD Thesis, University of St. Andrews)

Considerable debate exists about the causes of psychological gender differences and the effects of gendered socialisation and other societal factors. The aim of this PhD project was to investigate the impact of gendered socialisation and gender equality on psychological gender differences using both primary and secondary datasets. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the relevant academic literature. In Chapter 2, I have presented a meta-analysis on the correlation between national levels of gender equality and the gender gap in children’s mathematics performance, finding no significant overall correlation and thus no support for the existence of a ‘gender equality paradox’ in this area. In Chapter 3, I then investigated whether individual-level factors could be contributing to gender differences by conducting a study on the relationship between gender, feelings of imposterism, self-efficacy and belonging in a sample of university students. I found that women on average experienced higher levels of imposterism, which was linked to low levels of self-efficacy, but not to feelings of belonging. In Chapter 4, I examined the relationship between adult gender division and gendered childhood socialisation in non-industrialised societies using existing ethnographic data, finding that higher adult gender division correlated with larger gender differences in how much adults try to instil different traits in boys and girls. Finally, in Chapter 5, I conducted a study employing a priming paradigm, gathering empirical data on the potential effects priming participants about levels of gender equality on their romantic partner preferences. I found a significant relationship between partner preferences and self-reported feminist attitudes but not an effect of the priming material. The results of this thesis indicate that while socialisation and gender equality do seem to impact gender differences, their effects are not always consistent or straightforward.

This study was developed while attending the 2022 Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research.

Even or odd? Symmetry and the structure of category systems across languages (pre-print)
Charles Kemp

Language reflects how people organize experience into categories, and cross-linguistic studies have revealed universal tendencies in the categorization of domains such as kinship and color.  Here we consider universal tendencies involving the parity of category systems, and develop and test a theory that predicts whether category systems for a given domain tend to include an even or an odd number of categories. Consistent with the theory, we find that deictic day-naming and tense-marking systems tend to have an odd number of categories, but that systems for domains including seasons, phases of the moon, kinship, and cardinal directions tend to have an even number of categories. Our theory is founded on the principle of symmetry, and our results therefore provide evidence of the widespread influence of symmetry on categorization across languages and domains.

The appeal of insight: Why riddles and whodunits captivate us
Marius Mercier, Alexis Garsmeur, Hugo Mercier

Insight, or the “Aha” experience, is pivotal in the appreciation and engagement with various cultural products. This article explores how the feeling of insight contributes to the success of riddles and whodunits, two popular products with a strong cross-cultural appeal. We report a series of five experiments manipulating the probability of experiencing an insight when solving, or being provided with the solution of a riddle or a short whodunit story. Participants are more likely to declare wanting to consume and to share material that generates more insight. We also observe that many participants choose to consume a new riddle or a new whodunit instead of immediately finishing the experiment, but that only High Insight riddles, and not whodunits, were significantly preferred. These results suggest that feelings of insight play an important role in shaping some popular cultural products.

Morality and the Gods
Benjamin Grant Purzycki

The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. This Element probes how the social sciences have addressed this relationship by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. Sections 1 and 2 examine the historical roots of cross-cultural inquiry and Section 3 addresses the empirical tools developed to address cross-cultural patterns statistically. Sections 4-6 address how the contemporary evolutionary social sciences have been addressing the role religious cognition, behaviour, and beliefs play on moral conduct. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, this Element shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. It argues that the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.

Text Analysis and LLMs

Ethnographic records, Folklore and AI
Stelios Michalopoulos

In this Handbook chapter, I examine how integrating ethnographic and folklore records has shaped research on culture and economics in the 21st century. Advances in text analysis techniques and the incorporation of historical and satellite data have transformed the field. I explore how George Peter Murdock’s ethnographic contributions and Yuri Berezkin’s seminal folklore motif index have been utilized to shed light on the roots of comparative development. I conclude by proposing a methodology for leveraging Large Language Models to extract cultural insights from folklore motifs, demonstrating how ancestral narratives can complement ethnographic records and offer valuable perspectives on societal norms and the historical forces shaping economic behavior today.

Cultural Evolution and Adaptation

From ecology to ideology: environmental and cultural drivers of menstrual taboos
Arianna Quinn (BA Thesis, Psychology, University of Lethbridge)

This thesis explores the environmental and cultural influences on the prevalence and expression of menstrual taboos. Using cross-cultural ethnographic data, two hypotheses were tested: (i) menstrual taboos are more common in high-investment ecological conditions, such as harsh environments and pastoral subsistence strategies, and (ii) stricter menstrual taboos are more prevalent in these conditions, as they may serve as more effective mate-guarding mechanisms. The findings suggest that environmental factors have a weak effect on the likelihood and level of restriction of menstrual taboos. The thesis also investigates why these taboos persist despite increased education and globalization. Three main factors were explored: (i) costly signalling of mate quality, (ii) religion and supernatural punishment, and (iii) group signalling and social cohesion. This research contributes to a broader understanding of the persistence of menstrual taboos and offers insights into how cultural norms evolve and endure across diverse environments.

Neanderthals in the Rain: Assessing Neanderthals’ Strategies to Survive Wet and Cold Environments through an Experimental Analysis
Eleonora Scandola, Penny Spikins

Neanderthals’ adaptations to cold climates have been extensively debated, however, limited attention has been given to their survival in cold and wet environments. These conditions increase the dangers of cold-induced injuries such as frostbite or hypothermia, as wet clothing loses its insulative capacities. This research explores whether and how Neanderthals faced such changes and their implications on activities and behaviours. After reviewing biological and cultural adaptations and behaviours, this thesis devises experimental strategies to waterproof clothing. These experiments, inspired by ethnographic accounts, utilise Neanderthals’ technological repertoire. The results revealed that the most successful strategy required significant effort to be produced. Evidence suggests Neanderthals tended to remain isolated in their territories and cover shorter distances in their lifespan. Larger group numbers and greater interconnectivity could have supported job division and promoted technological complexity. Therefore, the challenges posed by cold and wet environments may have constrained Neanderthals’ territorial expansion, reducing group sizes and limiting social networks. Simultaneously, their restricted interconnectivity could have hindered the development of complex successful strategies, further limiting Neanderthals’ ability to cope with wet and cold conditions. This research calls for a deeper, more focused understanding of environmental adaptations and proposes a framework to unravel the tangled relationships between environment, behaviours and technology.

La crianza cooperativa en la especie humana: un enfoque biosociocultural (Cooperative breeding in the humans: a biosociocultural approach)
Keilyn Rodríguez-Sánchez, Scott Hergenrother

The article offers a hermeneutical bibliographic study of a selection of 73 texts to help better understand the place of cooperative parenting in the evolutionary history of humanity, providing evidence for the bio-social foundation for cooperative and altruistic behavior found among human beings and its selective role in human fitness. The essential role of intergenerational, intra-family, inter-group and intercultural cooperative relationships for human upbringing is evident. From biosociocultural diversity, the theoretical trends associated with the understanding of cooperative behavior in parenting are shown. In addition, the most outstanding authors and the most frequent methods in the study of the variables associated with this cooperative parenting behavior are presented. In this way, it is possible to make visible the process of human upbringing as an essentially social dynamic, where altruistic collaboration has generated a diversity of cultural strategies.

Research by HRAF Staff and Affiliates

A Global Study of the Ecological Dimensions of Hazards: An Ethnographic Approach
Samantha King, Cynthiann Heckelsmiller, Carol R. Ember, Eric C. Jones, Sebastian Wang Gaouette, Anj Lee Droe, Danielle Russell, Jacqueline Heitmann, Isana Raja, Michele Gelfand

Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern. While there is a plethora of research on climate adaptation, the literature is highly fragmented, and empirical studies are rarely carried out with global samples. This lack of comparative work limits our ability to understand how societies adapt to environmental hazards, thereby impeding effective policy and practice at a wider scale. To fill this gap, we outline a global comparative approach to the ethnographic study of hazards. The approach operationalizes five ecological dimensions of environmental hazards, including event type, frequency, onset speed, predictability, and severity, and investigates how they relate across a world-wide sample of 132 nonindustrial societies with significant variation in time and space. We then utilize this approach to explore how specific ecological dimensions might influence the adaptive capacity of societies to respond to hazards. Findings uncover generalizable patterns that exist across our global sample, suggesting that predictability enhances adaptive capacity, while temporal factors that promote uncertainty (including slow onset speed, longer event duration, and unpredictability) limit the success of adaptation efforts.

Land of Wood and Water: Empire, Nation-building and a History of Archaeology on the Island of Jamaica
Sebastian Wang Gaouette (HRAF Melvin Ember Intern)

In 1984, archaeologist Bruce Trigger published his tripartite framework for understanding the history of archaeology, citing three main research modes: colonialist, imperialist and nationalist. This article uses Trigger’s framework to examine the history of archaeology in Jamaica, as an example of a recently independent former slave colony. The author finds that while archaeology on the island worked to reinforce first colonialist, and later imperialist epistemologies until at least the mid-twentieth century, the development of a nationalist archaeology in Jamaica has faltered since then, in favor of foreign-backed research. Furthermore, the legacy of the hierarchical British racial system in Jamaica, together with the exceptional marginalization of Indigenous Taíno culture on the island (compared to other nearby islands in the Caribbean), has resulted in relatively little domestic investment into the island’s pre-colonial archaeology. Instead, much of the highest-profile domestic archeology in Jamaica in the six decades since the country’s independence has tended to focus on the origins of the island’s maroon communities.

 Love Motifs in Taino and Pueblo Art
Ian Skoggard

Continuing his cross-cultural study of love symbols, Ian Skoggard presented a paper at the Second International Love Studies Conference this past March, entitled “Love Motifs in Taino and Pueblo Art.”  He defines love symbols as those artifacts that invoke the memory of being in love. Such artifacts can have ritual, social, or personal uses. Skoggard argues that falling in love and the making of love are “transformative experiences,” to borrow a term from philosopher L. A. Paul, who in her work on epistemology describes childbirth as a uniquely personal experience knowable only to those persons who have experienced it. The experience of love can also be a transformative experience known only by people who have fallen in love. Love symbols are then potent symbols invoking memories of love and are appropriated to be used in other contexts to validate social structures and agencies.

In the earlier paper, Skoggard examined three artifacts from three cultures: the Turkana (Kenya) milk jug, the Aranda (Australia) bullroarer, and the Haida (Canada) raven rattle. Each artifact has what Canadian anthropologist Wilson Duff identifies as a vulvic-phallic form, which Skoggard argues represents the love act and invoking memories of love making. In his second paper, he examines Taino (Caribbean) stone sculpture and Pueblo (United States) pottery.

The Taino people lived in the Caribbean basin from 800 to 1550 AD. The triform Taino stone sculpture has a vulvic-phallic shape noted by Duff in Northwest Coast art. The earliest Taino art objects were made from conch shells with their hollow interior and conic-shaped exterior. The later stone sculpture replicates the shape of the conch shell with its elongated top and concave base. The sculpture also includes incised motifs of interlocking bird heads, which anthropologists interpret as expressing a dualistic worldview based on gender differences. This particular motif has its origins in the Olmec culture (1600–350 BCE) of Mesoamerica. Ancestral and contemporary Pueblo pottery design also incorporates this motif where it takes on a more abstract form that has its own unique aesthetic effects, a vivifying dualism that invokes the rhythms of lovemaking.

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References

Anderson, S., S. D. Plessis, S. Parsa & J. Robinson 2025. The Persistence of Female Political Power in Africa. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (available on-line: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33838.pdf, accessed 9 June 2025).

Foster, N. R., E. T. Apostolaki, K. DiBenedetto, et al. 2025. Societal value of seagrass from historical to contemporary perspectives. Ambio (available on-line: https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13280-025-02167-z, accessed 13 May 2025).

Garfield, Z. H. & S. Lew-Levy 2025. Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. Nature Communications 16, 3387 (available on-line: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58764-9, accessed 9 June 2025).

Kaaronen, R. O. 2025. Living in the Mycelial World: A global cross‐cultural ethnomycological review. Topics in Cognitive Science tops.70003 (available on-line: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.70003, accessed 9 June 2025).

Kemp, C. 2024. Even or odd? Symmetry and the structure of category systems across languages (available on-line: https://osf.io/qep2j, accessed 21 January 2025).

King, S., C. Heckelsmiller, C. R. Ember, et al. 2025. A Global Study of the Ecological Dimensions of Hazards: An Ethnographic Approach (available on-line: https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=5258298, accessed 9 June 2025).

Lavender Forsyth, G. A., A. Chaudhuri & Q. Atkinson 2025. The Dual Foundations of Political Ideology Are Ubiquitous across Human Social Life. Current Anthropology 66, 389–412 (available on-line: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/735619, accessed 9 June 2025).

Mercier, M., A. Garsmeur & H. Mercier 2025. The appeal of insight: Why riddles and whodunits captivate us. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (available on-line: https://doi.apa.org/doi/10.1037/aca0000773, accessed 13 May 2025).

Michalopoulos, S. 2025. Ethnographic Records, Folklore, and AI. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (available on-line: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33700.pdf, accessed 13 May 2025).

Pákozdy, C. 2025. The impact of gendered socialisation and gender equality on psychological traits (available on-line: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/31916, accessed 13 May 2025).

Purzycki, B. G. n.d. Morality and the Gods. Elements in the Psychology of Religion (available on-line: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/morality-and-the-gods/B8BF0E8ECE1EF915F9560F8A459123D5, accessed 9 June 2025).

Quinn, A. N. & U. of L. F. of A. and Science 2025. From ecology to ideology : environmental and cultural drivers of menstrual taboos. Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Psychology (available on-line: https://hdl.handle.net/10133/7041, accessed 9 June 2025).

Sánchez, K. R. & S. Hergenrother 2025. La crianza cooperativa en la especie humana: un enfoque biosociocultural. Cuadernos de antropología: Revista Digital del Laboratorio de Etnología ‘María Eugenia Bozzoli Vargas’ 35, 1–27 (available on-line: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=10006531, accessed 9 June 2025).

Scandola, E. & P. Spikins 2025. Neanderthals in the Rain: Assessing Neanderthals’ Strategies to Survive Wet and Cold Environments through an Experimental Analysis. EXARC Journal (available on-line: https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10782, accessed 9 June 2025).

Thomson, J., S. Lew-Levy, C. V. Rueden & D. N. E. Stibbard-Hawkes 2025. “Fiercely Egalitarian”: Thematic Cross-Cultural Analysis Reveals Regularities in the Maintenance of Egalitarianism Across Four Independent African Hunter-Gatherer Groups. Cross-Cultural Research 10693971251338210 (available on-line: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10693971251338210, accessed 11 June 2025).

Wang Gaouette, S. 2025. Land of Wood and Water: Empire, Nation-building and a History of Archaeology on the Island of Jamaica. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 35 (available on-line: http://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha-732/, accessed 9 July 2025).

 

 

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